Quick Service Restaurants often require a means to dispense various sauces & condiments (fluent materials) onto food in a controllable, foodsafe, and efficient manner. Fluent materials include foodstuffs ranging from oils and vinegars, viscous sauces like mayonnaise, and from smooth to chunky sauces containing particles such as chopped onion or chili seeds. Prior art sauce dispensers are often based on known devices such as caulking guns or cake-icing dispensers to dispense fluent materials, but because they evolved from devices used for a different purpose, they often do not perform as well for the purpose at hand.
Fluent material dispensers styled after caulking guns are not ergonomic to use because their means of dispensing, their handle/trigger mechanism, is ninety degrees from the direction of fluent material discharge. To dispense accurately with a gun styled dispenser, the user is forced to use two hands to stabilize the dispenser because its weight is extended away from the handle. When dispensing with one hand, the user's wrist fatigues and accuracy is reduced. Using both hands to dispense increases the liability of inadvertent user contact with the food, as well as with other food preparers in confined spaces and contributes to lowered efficiency and increased preparation times.
Dispensers with gun-like or side projecting handle/triggers often obstruct a clear view of the dispensing target when used, thereby causing wasted food, lost efficiency and higher cost to the consumer. For the same reason, dispensers with a handle/trigger that projects away from the sides of its fluent material container require a lot of room to store because their handle interferes with adjacent dispensers. This can be problematic as sauces are often stored on a preparation rack and/or in a refrigerator.
Most prior art dispensers are a single unit, dispensing mechanism and fluent material storage container. This requires the purchase of redundant dispensing mechanisms and their storage with each dispenser, thus adding to cost, clutter, increased handling and washing, and the like.
A number of prior art designs of fluent material dispensers stand upright on their non-dispensing end leaving their dispensing end exposed to contamination, as well as causing their contents to flow to the non-dispensing end. This deficiency requires that the user attempt to reverse the direction of the fluent material in order to dispense by shaking, jerking and hitting the dispenser. This requirement is inefficient, unsafe and a poor design.
Prior art designs dispense fluent materials with pistons that rely on a perfect seal with the inside wall of the dispensing container. This creates the unnecessary requirement that the user fills the dispensing container extremely accurately or an air pocket will be formed between the piston and the foodstuff when the piston is pushed into the dispensing container. The result is that sauce is spilled onto countertops or the floor, instead of dispensed onto the target food, and fouls the dispenser as well as creates a messy work environment. Without a means to expel any air between the fluent material and the container's piston, foodstuffs will be wasted which will require more rigorous cleaning of dispensers and added expense. Also, current designs have many extraneous and complex parts that are often hard to clean, which is an important factor when food safety and product maintenance is an issue.
Another requirement in a Quick Service Restaurant environment is the repeatable and accurate dispensing of fluent materials. Common prior art sauce dispensers have limited means to adjust accurate dispensing volumes, requiring much skill to dispense a known quantity and are often wasteful. Anyone who has ever used a traditional caulking gun knows the disaster that occurs when one squeezes the trigger mechanism too hard. With less viscous materials however, the need to dispense accurately is necessary, but present devices do not have easy or efficient means to adjust the dispenser to produce different dispensing volumes as needed for different foodstuffs. At best, a means to arrest the range of motion is available in some prior art, but the mechanism must be manually adjusted each time one wants to dispense different volumes, which often requires laborious disassembly of the dispenser or requires special tools.
Therefore there is a need for a fluent material dispensing system that is not subject to one or more limitations of the prior art.
This background information is provided for the purpose of making known information believed by the applicant to be of possible relevance to the present invention. No admission is necessarily intended, nor should be construed, that any of the preceding information constitutes prior art against the present invention.